Posted on March 4, 2022 by Cory Benson
LeMond 8 carbon road & gravel bikes are finally here, unveiling that revolutionary US-made carbon technology they’ve been teasing us with for years. That first came to life in a series of ultra-stealthy e-bikes, but now LeMond is getting back to his proper road racing roots. While they’ve hinted at more efficient carbon fiber production processes since 2016, these new road bikes are all about premium lightweight performance, and come with premium price tags to match…
Greg LeMond’s 8 second come-from-behind Tour de France victory changed his life, not only in the obvious point of making him a winner of the world’s biggest road race, but also in making him realize the power of simple but transformative change. It was admittedly his adoption of new aerobar tech that really won that race, so that 8 began to symbolize revolutionary tech for him.
Now, he’s calling the LeMond 8 road bike “the most transformative change to carbon fiber frame construction” since the first carbon bike frames of the 1980s & 90s.
In 2016, we were invited to Knoxville, Tennessee to get a sneak peek of what LeMond promised would be their future of carbon fiber. Not just carbon fiber though, but domestically produced carbon fiber that had the potential to revolutionize industries outside of the bicycle world. Of course, the next generation of carbon bicycles was also always on the menu.
Having partnered with the Oakridge National Laboratories, LeMond initially set out to develop “the holy grail of carbon fiber,” or carbon that could be produced at $5 per pound. At that price, carbon fiber would actually be cheaper to produce than using aluminum.
Since then, LeMond has relocated the bicycle operations to a new facility in West Knoxville, where these new road bikes will apparently be made moving forward.
Now, on the outside, the new LeMond 8 road bike looks pretty similar to many of the modern aero road bikes we’ve seen in recent years. But inside is a unique LeMond 8 MatrixCore combining a carbon sandwich with an ultralight Xenecore expanding foam. That promises more equal internal pressure when molding the carbon (vs. removable mandrels or inflatable bladders) and also stays inside the completed bike to further damp vibration.
Together with the foam core, LeMond incorporates internal reinforced carbon truss structures that add strength & stiffness at key frame junctions, while maintaining light & thin carbon wall sections that are resistant to external damage. The resulting LeMond 8 framesets are said to be “some of the strongest and safest frames in the world” without adding unnecessary weight.
With more control of individual fiber placement and targeted support of key elements, the LeMond 8 was able to be built with no metal inserts at all. Even threaded water bottle bosses & bottom bracket threads are lighter & stronger in carbon, with just steel bolts the only metal that attaches to the carbon bike. It even gets a carbon fiber direct mount derailleur hanger.
The carbon T47 bottom bracket itself is unique, interlocking a precise threaded carbon lattice cylinder by co-molding it into the frame during final production. Classically modern threaded BB with no weight penalty.
Attached to the front of the frame, a monocoque 1-piece carbon handlebar+stem cockpit and integrated fork share similar construction with internal structural ribs, and MatrixCore foam in the case of the fork. Again, heavy metal inserts that risk galvanic oxidation are all but eliminated, and riders are left with fully internal cable routing integration and even a system to assure that the bars & fork are always perfectly aligned.
The LeMond 8’s geometry is described as “True Road Feel”, with a wide range of eight stock sizes (47-62cm). Each size gets adapted tube dimensions, size-specific chainstays, headtube angles & fork offsets to result in similar Trail figures for all riders. “Every rider benefits from the same optimal setup… for a consistent ride and feel quality throughout the line, no matter the size.”
The LeMond 8 is an aero road bike and incorporates a reduced frontal profile and aerodynamic Kamm tail tubing profiles. It also doesn’t hurt that all cables are routed fully internal, although the bikes are hydraulic disc brake AND electronic shift only.
The bike features a unique proprietary aero seatpost & channel clamp designed to spread clamping force over a wider 66mm section of the post. A side benefit is that accessories like a taillight and/or saddlebag can also be attached via the channel.
The LeMond 8 has generous 32mm all-road tire clearance (with complete builds offering 25/28/30mm tire options) and features 12mm thru-axles, flat mount disc brakes, an option for a conventionally integrated 2-piece bar & stem setup, and is offered in Tour Blue with silver graphics or Classics grey with Maillot Jaune yellow logos.
The debut of the LeMond 8 also brings with it the Team LeMond virtual cycling club, and the tease of that gravel bike too. Included in your LeMond 8 purchase is club membership that will also get you invites to events with Greg LeMond, like this summer’s 4-day riding experience in Chatel for the arrival of the 8th stage of the Tour de France.
You also gain early access to new LeMond products, plus annual club cycling kit and members-only quarterly Town Hall Zoom calls with Greg. Oh, and there’s a Team LeMond Pro Deal. Once you own one LeMond 8 as a Team LeMond member, you will get a 50% discount off the next LeMond carbon framesets, wheelsets & new carbon fiber components you buy over the next 3-4 years (in limited numbers).
In that time, there will be a LeMond 8 Aero Gravel Frame, a second-generation LeMond 8 road bike by 2025, two sets of carbon wheels, and more “new LeMond Carbon Fiber New Components”.
The new LeMond 8 is available to pre-order with a sizable deposit now in one of two options. For a $6000 deposit and a final total price of $8500 / 9500€ you will get a carbon LeMond 8 road bike frame, fork, 1-piece handlebar/stem, seatpost & 47mm deep wheelset. You will need to supply the component build kit.
Or for a whopping $9500 deposit on the way to a final total $12,500 / 13,900€ price tag you will get a complete carbon LeMond 8 road bike built up with a full Shimano Dura-Ace Di2 12 groupset.
Global deliveries to North America & most of the EU from today’s pre-orders are slated to begin this July 2022 on a first-come, first-served basis with priority given to complete bikes.
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Just what the market needs, and absurdly expensive road bike with proprietary parts. Great job gang
You know road racing is a professional sport, right?
yeah but pros don’t generally pay for their own bikes. Dentists and average Joe’s are the ones that keep the bike companies in the black. A bike brand sponsoring a team is not really seen as a revenue generating activity. More of an expense in hopes to sell bikes to the aforementioned Dentists and Joe’s
Right! I wish Greg Lemond all the best, and hope he is successful, but the market for $12K bikes is tiny, like the market for BMW M5s. You can’t make money on the 12K bikes, the maxed out S-Works bikes, the money is made down range, in the 3-5K bikes that share the make and model name, and some of the tech. I hope Lemond plans to use this as the flagship model, and eventually get down to a more available $5-7K range.
Wrong. They make a ton of money on the high priced models. The frames that retail for $5000-$8000 cost about the same as the lower priced models (For Chinesse made frames about $100-300). A Dura Ace group at OEM is about $800, although probably less for a HUGE buyer like Trek or Specialized). They use their bran wheels and parts which are DIRT cheap.
All told, that $12k bike costs about $1500 to produce. If you can’t make money with those margins you need to find a new job.
But how many of the high end bikes do they sell vs the cheaper ones. They may sell in the hundreds for the ultra expensive top tier but they sell in the thousands to tens of thousands for the lower end.
you think specialized clears $10500 of profit on a 12 k bike?
There are currently 3 professional athletes under my roof, one french, one NZ and one american and none could GAF about bike tech other than the geometry. They just ride.
Bikes come in all different price points. The low end bikes just aren’t as exciting to talk about
“how much to replace the headset bearings?”
This is not that expensive…plenty of $20k road bikes around. Also there is no mention of actual weight or aero figures, that carbon process has been done before by BMC on their forks and even THM years ago….failing to see the innovation here….
What, so anything less than $20k is now “reasonable?” The mind boggles…
Have you tried buying a house lately? Or renting a shipping container. Buckle up, “reasonable” is changing.
The existence of Ferrari has no effect on your ability to buy a Toyota. Nobody is seriously arguing than you need a $20k bike to enjoy the sport and cheap bikes are better than they’ve ever been.
While there may be multiple options to spend $20k on a bike, that doesn’t mean that many are sold. I ride every weekend, in a popular area. I think a fair guess is that less than 5% of riders are tooling around on bikes that cost more than $10K. I suppose that if you counted the bikes at real race events and the top riders at fondos there are a few 20k bikes.
Go to the “Pro’s Closet” website and see all the high priced bikes that were sold and are now being resold. Or go to Ebay and search road bikes sold listings, there are ton of USED bikes sold for more than $6k and many over $9k… and these are USED bikes that had to be purchased to be sold on Ebay. Even one road bike sold for more than $8k is one too many.
New Carbon = Strongest Frame on the market
Will this company be in business in 3-5 years?
what a joke. just what the world needs, another $13K bike. Why cant an American company at least TRY to make an affordable option? when i think of premium carbon, America is not what comes to mind and the premium market is already full of options. what the US does need is affordable US made bikes. what drives people away is these US companies think that US consumers should be honored to pay premium prices for average products. that needs to change if they want the general rider to buy a US bike. right now the value is just not there.
I think it might be okay for someone named Greg LeMond to attach his name to a high-end road bike. Just a thought.
did i say it wasn’t?
You implied that Lemond should target a different market. I think the market that recognizes his name is precisely the one the Lemond 8 is made for.
Give it time. The common strategy for an upstart is to sell a low-volume, premium offering first before moving on to a mid-volume, mid-range offering and then finally a high-volume, mainstream offering.
I think that the business model can support a $13k bike, but not without the tech in the 13K model being applied to more approachable bikes. I admit to not having hard metrics, but I suggest that most manufactures live and die on the mid range, the $5k bikes, well maybe now the $8k bikes. A Specialized Aethos S-Works might be a good comparable, though I do hope that this new Lemond process makes for a better bike. My bet is that Specialized makes profit on the Aethos Expert ($8K) and even more on the Comp ($5k), vice the $13K Expert. I ride with a group of riders that are all able to spend $15-20k on a bike if they chose, but none will. We are all in our 50s and that extra $5-7K won’t buy us anything beyond the worry that we might total a $15K bike on a bad day, or if a driver rear ends us in transit. The last rider in my group to buy a new bike dropped about $9k on a beautiful Trek Domane, after an 11 month wait. I think that is the current reasonable high end.
a 13,000$ has all the rights to be available, a 13,000$ bike is simply not a way into a full retail distributorship and support. This bike is not make its way across the big 3.
“My bet is that Specialized makes profit on the Aethos Expert ($8K) and even more on the Comp ($5k), vice the $13K Expert.”
It’s far more likely the opposite, at least if we’re talking about a single unit. If the lower priced bike is made on the same, or even a similar frameset, the higher price will yield a higher profit margin. One would have to know the cost differences in all of the components that make up the finished product. It is certainly possible to make more money on the lower margin product if sales volume makes up for it and it’s a safe assumption that the highest priced products are the lowest volume.
Bike companies make MORE money on the higher priced models. The $12k Athoes costs about $1500 to produce. The $8k Atheos costs about a $1100
People want domestic made products but don’t want to pay the premium for it. American labor costs more.
And yet, that premium is almost invariably not getting you anything any better.
And there’s the hard truth. Long ago the bike industry reached a point where it couldn’t be done any better in the US, it would just cost more $$.
It’s commendable that this venture is getting off the ground. Sure, $12.5k is an absurd price for a road bike, but all of the big brands are asking the same absurd price for their made in Asia models, built with all of the same components. This brand is offering a unique construction method and geometry story (430mm chainstays on the 62cm??), made in USA at the *same* price as the (admittedly excellent) foreign made bikes. It’ll be interesting to see where it goes.
I thought it looked nice until I saw the valve stem is centered on the last letter of LeMond.
People can bitch but I think it’s pretty cool. I’ll bet price can come down, and with his goal of carbon for $5/pound I think he’ll keep at it.
Wish in one hand. You know, in the other. Prepare to use your wish hand to wash the other because it’s the only one that will still be empty.
No head tube length or tt length in chart. No weights. Looks like a de rosa. Same partnership as initial or no?
the stack and reach are given with the seat tube angle. If you can’t do math you’re obviously not the target market
well, we’d need the fork length and offset as well to do that buddy. don’t see that either.
With stack and reach the top tube and head tube lengths become redundant measurements.
Nope. For fit all you need are stack, reach, and STA. That locates your bars and seat tube relative to the bottom bracket.
LeMond went all the way to Australia to work a deal with the university of Geelong to be able to use their cheaper manufacturing tech. You would think that he would pass this down some of the cost saving to the customer. I get it carbon is labor intensive, but hey you found a cheaper way to manufacturer it. I would think LeMond would want to gut Trek and what better way than selling just as good a bike for a lesser price.
Development costs still have to be recouped…
The hood placement and bar angle is atrocious. Please, guys, pay attention to the details!
Too bad its hydraulic disc brake and electronic shift only, no rimrake and mechanical version. And I dont like the use of proprietary parts, and integrated stem/handlebar combo. And I dont prefer the fully integrated cables. And the price is a bit steep for me. But all that aside its a nice bike.
this is a nice market entry bike for the brand. Its premium with enough innovation to interest the thinking man. Youtube researchers need not apply. No aero claims is big plus because generally that is laced with malarkey anyway. Who really cares about weight because theres no rel difference between a 6.8kg road race bike and a 7.8kg road race bike. Better to lose weight reading the full New York Times in the morning before your ride. Take my money Greg!!
Not my world, but wishing Lemond nothing but the best. Perhaps my only critique is that in the current market, I’d probably have gone for 35c clearance (which I suspect will fit).
OK, it’s the interweb, so one more critique: As a MN ex-pat, I’d have liked to see him building them there, in his home state.
Home state? That is a hard one. Born in CA, raised in NV and adult life in MN…we still consider him a Nevadan.
GL was born and raised in California. He moved to Minnesota because his wife is from there.
Looks great, but I wish they offered a steel bike as well, for those of us who aren’t’ racers, and who don’t want to spend quite as much money. Their Washoe bike was awesome.
Still have my Reynolds 853 Buenos Aires.
Awesome Job ! safe and light ! Strong ! haters gonna hate
That fork to head tube transition is just…nnff… How is that not censored? That’s literally bike porn!
In all seriousness though, this bike looks quite good! Can’t wait to see some on the road!
there’s a half-dozen bikes already out with these lines.
This doesn’t look like a serious bike, but more important is that I clicked on the f’in clickbait.
I’d like to wish Greg Lemond every success. He was my hero as a teenager in the late 80s and inspired me to take up this sport that has given me so much enjoyment for the past 30+ years. Especially as he got right royally commercially stiffed by Armstrong / Trek. Good luck with this new brand!
Hence I will never ever buy a trek.
So they partnered with Oak Ridge to develop carbon that would beat the price of aluminium, and the result is a bike that costs $13k+ because of vigorous handwaving and transformative things that are transformative. Good job, marketing department, usually I’d have read that as a massive failure.
Interesting bait and switch isn’t it? They are literally telling us that they have reduced their cost of production and then show us a bike that is one of the most expensive in the world. A weird move. This bike doesn’t seem to move the needle in terms of engineering or production in any meaningful way and that is a shame.
Interesting bike, most interesting of which is the lengths they went to eliminate metal sleeves for receiving threaded parts like the through-axles, bottom bracket, and rear derailleur hanger.
Conventional wisdom seems to frown upon cutting threads into carbon fiber. Color me curious as to how LeMond did it – presumably with little in the way of downsides.
The inserts are probably molded with chopped short strand fiber, or they might be molded in “forged carbon”. Both of which use shorter non-uniform carbon orientations, but are capable of smaller minimum radii. It is possible that they might chase the thread post molding so that the fit up is smoother, but its hard to know for sure. There is a reason press-fit is used in BBs- they don’t have threads! Which is good design practice for carbon parts.
@Brad Yeah, “forged composite” does sound plausible. Hard to tell at this point without someone like Raoul Luescher taking an in-depth peek.
And agreed with carbon bikes normally opting for press-fit BB shells for this reason.
Hmmm, wonder if the QC will be just as “good” as the rest of the bike industry? Sarcasm off.
With that said, not the market for me, so not directly relevant comment. However the prices rises on bikes are so far outstripping inflation (blame shipping all you want but there are allot of bikes in a shipping container to spread the cost), the bubble will have to collapse eventually as it has in other markets before.
I don’t have a problem with the price – that’s the market now for top end bikes, crazy as it is. The issue is the deposit – I see a number like that, and I wonder about solvency.
I would not ride one if you gave it to me. Don’t want internal cabling, proprietary parts, 12 speed, electronic shifting. It is another over priced carbon bike, although not as over priced as those made in China with cheap labor.
I don’t have a problem with the price, either, since it’s not a bike I’d ever take an interest in. I just don’t like carbon bikes. That the latest and greatest have internal routing for electric components, proprietary parts, pressfit BB shells, etc. makes them even less appealing.
I genuinely don’t want this bike, or ones like it and it is NOT “sour grapes” as I could pay cash for one easily. (hint- if you can’t pay for a bicycle with cash, you can’t afford it) It is a matter of stupidity, all the “innovations” on this bike- disc brakes, tubeless tires, electronic shifting, pressfit BB, 12 speeds, internal cables all come with SIGNIFICANT drawbacks (if you wait for a “review” to tell you the real drawbacks good luck) that may outweigh their advantages. To be sure, NONE of these “innovations” make the bike faster or allow to enjoy your ride more.
I love that fork steerer tube tech with the ribs and foam. Reminds me of the old TIME+ forks with foam.
It looks like whomever designed the stem/bar forgot to factor in that headtubes aren’t at 90 degrees. Nothing very interesting otherwise.
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